The importance of data security in enterprise business applications has risen sharply in recent years, particularly in view of newer regulations regarding data privacy, and the increased popularity of cloud-based environments. Controlling who has access to a particular set of data in a business application environment is a key concern while implementing security in such environments.
One of the common means of controlling data access is Role Based Access Control (RBAC), which has become a de facto industry standard, and which has been adopted and implemented by many business application vendors.
However, although there has been much research directed to the implementation and security benefits of RBAC, there has been less research on the impacts of such a data security model on the performance and scalability of business applications. Many commercial business applications use a relational database at the back-end, with processing of data managed through structured query language (SQL) queries. The performance of such SQL queries often dictates the performance and scalability of the application, among other factors.